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Shenanigans Abound

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November, December, I can’t remember

I know that I have been a scant presence on the internet these days, and I thought I would explain myself.

I, on top of teaching full time, decided to once again participate in National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo for those of you in the know. This is a writing challenge in which participants indulge their inner crazy writer for 30 days of writing insanity. The goal is to have a 50,000 word novel by the end of November, and ladies and gentleman I am proud announce that I did it. I wrote 50,000 words of a novel. After trying for about six years, I have finally done the whole thing in 30 days (and six hours, stupid time difference).

So that is where I was the majority of November, and no you cannot read it.

Now we find ourselves in December. What? It feels like the middle of October here, and we had a week straight of rain everyday, so the holidays don’t feel so unreasonable as they did when I was still sweating my way through the days of Mid November. We got ourselves a Christmas tree, small and artificial but nicely decorated by the Redhead, there is holiday music playing in the stores, and we sang Christmas hymns this Sunday morning. If have been told that it is not like this in the rest of China, but that my city is a little different than the rest of this country. I have to admit that I am grateful for this little slice of Western-ness in the middle of everything that I have going on here. It’s comforting for this girl that is just maybe a little too far from home.

As I type this, my landlord is pacing around my apartment waiting for the repair men to arrive to fix my ceiling. You see, on Monday upon my arrival home from school, I found a strange damp thing sitting on the middle of my bed. After I looked at it closer, I realized that it was bits of my ceiling that had fallen off due to the absurd amount of rain that had fallen in the past week. I called our Chinese friend so that she could call the landlord and he came over to investigate. I don’t speak Chinese and he doesn’t speak English, and so we passed the phone back and forth with my Chinese friend on the other end, and she translated for us. It felt silly, but in the end we decided that the repair men would come on Saturday. Saturday came and went, I bought a pair of boots, but there was no repair. Then this morning we got a phone call saying that they were ready to fix the ceiling about ten minutes before we were about to leave because it is Sunday, and there is a particular place that we like to go every Sunday. So he said he would come back later. It’s later and we are sitting in awkward and never ending silence. Oh goodness, I wish I liked to talk to people when we both had the luxury of speaking the same, and now I have no idea what to do…

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2 thoughts on “November, December, I can’t remember”

Well it’s nice to hear from you again and I hope your ceiling got fixed and your dry again. To bad it wasn’t over the fish tank then they (if there are any left) would get a nice drink of water. Take care of yourself and enjoy the season with your tree and friends. Thinking of you every day and wishing you well.

Wow, didn’t realize you’d taken the NaNoWriMo challenge before. I’m too much of a scaredy cat to try, but I am working on a short story. I also have a mentor friend who is a published author, so yay me. Would you at least maybe tell what the book is about? Heck, maybe someday you will be published! Now that I know you’ve taken a crack at it, maybe I’ll think about it. But then again I’ve tried my hand at a book before and it didn’t go so well.